Yong Rui
Yong Rui is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Berkeley Frontier Fund, as well as other boards of startups, universities and non-profit organizations. From 2016 to 2025, he was Lenovo Global CTO and President of Lenovo Emerging Technology Group (ETG), reporting directly to the CEO. He also sat on Lenovo Executive Committee (LEC), Lenovo’s highest decision-making body. As Lenovo’s Global CTO, he oversaw $2.5B annual R&D budget and drove Lenovo’s R&D directions in AI algorithms and systems, AI devices, AI computing infrastructure, XR/metaverse, wireless communication, and smart vertical solutions. As President of Lenovo ETG, he oversaw turning emerging technologies into new products and new business. During his 8.5 years at Lenovo, he contributed to a threefold increase in the company’s stock price.
Prior to joining Lenovo, Yong spent 18 years with Microsoft where he held various leadership roles in R&D strategy, basic research, technology incubation and product development. He and his teams have developed and shipped products used by millions of users around the world, including Microsoft Bing Search (image search, video search and entity search), Microsoft Office (RoundTable/LiveMeeting, OneNote and Sway), Microsoft OneDrive (photo tagging), Microsoft Hololens (3D reconstruction), and Microsoft AI Cognitive Services on Azure (image and video analysis).
A Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE, and a Foreign Fellow of Academia Europea and Canadian Academy of Engineering, Yong is recognized as a leading expert in AI and multimedia. He is a recipient of the 2018 ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, 2017 IEEE SMC Society Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award, 2017 ACM TOMM Nicolas Georganas Best Paper Award, 2016 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, and 2010 Most Cited Paper of the Decade Award from Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. He holds 112 issued patents, has published 4 books, 12 book chapters, and 300 referred journal and conference papers. Yong has served on numerous national and international science and engineering program committees, steering committees, editorial boards, and review panels, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Australian Research Council, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and ACM/IEEE international conferences. Yong is a member of University of Washington ECE Advisory Board.
Yong received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1999 and was named a Distinguished Alumni from UIUC ECE Department in 2021